“Good”, “bad”, “right”, “wrong”, etc. are words that people project their confusions about preferences / guilt / religion on to. They do not have commonly agreed upon definitions. When you define the words precisely the questions become scientific, not philosophical.
People are looking for some way to capture their intuitions that God above is casting judgement about the true value of things—without invoking supernatural ideas. But they cannot, because nothing in the world actually captures the spirit of this intuition (the closest thing is preferences). So they relapse into confusion, instead of accepting the obvious conclusion that moral beliefs are in the same ontological category as opinions (like “my favorite color is red”), not facts (like “the sky appears blue”).
I expect much of this will be largely subjective and have no objective fact of the matter, but it can be better informed by both empirical and philsophical research.
So I would say it is all subjective. But I agree that understanding algorithms will help us choose which actions satisfy our preferences. (But not that searching for explanations of the magic of conscious will help us decide which actions are good.)
Ya, we probably roughly agree about meta-ethics, too. But I wouldn’t say I “understand” consciousness or ethics, except maybe at a high level, because I’m not settled on what I care about and how. The details matter, and can have important implications. I would want to defer to my more informed views.
For example, the evidence in this paper was informative to me, even assuming strong illusionism:
I also claim that I understand ethics.
“Good”, “bad”, “right”, “wrong”, etc. are words that people project their confusions about preferences / guilt / religion on to. They do not have commonly agreed upon definitions. When you define the words precisely the questions become scientific, not philosophical.
People are looking for some way to capture their intuitions that God above is casting judgement about the true value of things—without invoking supernatural ideas. But they cannot, because nothing in the world actually captures the spirit of this intuition (the closest thing is preferences). So they relapse into confusion, instead of accepting the obvious conclusion that moral beliefs are in the same ontological category as opinions (like “my favorite color is red”), not facts (like “the sky appears blue”).
So I would say it is all subjective. But I agree that understanding algorithms will help us choose which actions satisfy our preferences. (But not that searching for explanations of the magic of conscious will help us decide which actions are good.)
Ya, we probably roughly agree about meta-ethics, too. But I wouldn’t say I “understand” consciousness or ethics, except maybe at a high level, because I’m not settled on what I care about and how. The details matter, and can have important implications. I would want to defer to my more informed views.
For example, the evidence in this paper was informative to me, even assuming strong illusionism:
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/veterinary-science/articles/10.3389/fvets.2022.788289/full
And considerations here also seem important to me:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AvubGwD2xkCD4tGtd/only-mammals-and-birds-are-sentient-according-to?commentId=yiqJTLfyPwCcdkTzn